Slowing Down the World

A Critique of Modernity and Ecological Consciousness in Fouad Laroui’s The Tribulations of the Last Sijilmassi

Abstract

This article examines Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi (2014) by Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan French-language writer whose work explores the tensions between modernity, cultural heritage, and globalization. Drawing on an ecocritical framework—understood as the study of literary representations of the relationship between humans and their environment—combined with a postcolonial perspective attentive to the cultural and ideological effects of Western modernity, the analysis adopts a textual and thematic approach. It shows that the protagonist’s quest, marked by walking, slowness, and a withdrawal from technological devices, constitutes a symbolic resistance to the ideology of progress and the acceleration of contemporary life. By reactivating the myth of the Golden Age, conceived as the representation of an original time of harmony between human beings and nature prior to the ruptures of civilization, and by foregrounding a renewed sensory engagement with the natural world, Laroui’s novel stages a process of identity recomposition in which the individual seeks to re-inscribe himself within a balanced relationship to the Earth. The fiction thus becomes a space for critiquing the logics of the Anthropocene.